Story of the Piece: Emergence

I love so many plants in Far North Queensland, but I have two favourites — lipstick palms, and fan palms.

However, of all the fan palms - Licuala ramsayi is my favourite of them all.

In the Daintree rainforest they are magical. The magic of the light filtering through them, the size of them, the way they open like they've decided to.

Emergence is a Licuala ramsayi caught at the moment it does what every fan palm does - it opens. Four panels, each one a quarter of the burst, meeting at the centre where the green is youngest.

I painted it living. Not the gold of Radiance, not the dark stillness of the rainforest at night, but the green of newer fronds - that capture the filtered light from the older palms above. Leaves so alive they don't quite seem real.

Like the fan palm itself, Emergence doesn't have one right way to be. The four panels can be rearranged. Hang them as the full burst. Pull them apart. Rotate the quadrants. The piece moves with you.

This is the second Licuala ramsayi in the series. There will be more. Each one a different moment, a different light, a different way of seeing the same magical plant.

The things that have lived get to live again — and become something that lives in another person's soul